The technology blog of Neil Thompson

One of the things that has really niggled me about my iPad is that it continues to be bloody noisy even if you have the volume turned right down. While any music is silenced notification noises, bleeps and bings continue to come through at full volume – not good when you are trying to sleep.

It seems that because, as daft as it seems, notification noises are not controlled by the volume control. Notifications are either off or on.

All is not lost though as there are two ways (at least) of turning off notification noises – the first is the easiest. If you have the side switch immediately above the volume control configured to Mute (Settings > General > Use Side Switch to) then flicking this on will do the trick. However, if you have it set to “Lock Rotation” as I have then you need to double click the home button the slide as far to the left as you can. Then click on the speaker button on the left until it is crossed out (see below).

For some bizarre reason this mute only affects the system sounds, which is a tad confusing but it does mean that you can have the volume up and listen to music without being interrupted by notification sounds.